From: steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 21:52:31 +0100 Subject: Re: Differend Reading Group - my luggage --------------EB4A7EB8797CE03D2068211B Lydia Language is never private, it is always already social. And just as with techno-science no technology arrives that is not always already social - so an injustice may be assigned reterospectively but actually its seems as if the naming and the act are synonomous. The list of injustices was interesting but equally telling are the injustices that have faded from existence - arguably for example 'heresy' as a naming, represented by the burning of the followers of Amalric of Bena at the stake - is an injustice that no longer exists. (I phantasize at this moment of the 'naming' of the extermination of Homo Neanderthal by our ancesters....) - How then does moral progress happen - many answers - firstly perhaps it doesn't - rather resistance, struggle and oppression do occur - secondly the phrase 'moral progress' doesn't mean anything. For us perhaps the issue is always in the shadow of the enlightenment figures - given Lyotard's undoubted debt to Kant and Wittgenstein (Pretexts p xiii but also Title xi) which stand reclaimed by Lyotard as reterospective 'thinkers of dispersion' which shapes our context, however the writers of the infrastructure are avoided or critiqued. Hence the importance of the usually unspoken other of 'moral philosophy' which is has in recent times usually been raised in its softer ethical variant. And (Address xv) it's always nice to be immediately wrong - 'there will be no more books' - not so there will be more than ever before... because the number of readers explodes... (curious how the inhabitants of the G8 countries imagine that 100Million users of computers is more important than 4bn additional readers of the text...) Hence perhaps Lyotard's form - hypertextual with many authorially defined routes through the maze of the text - (Genre, Style Reader xiv) (...personally this time, I engage in an essentially linear but discontinuous hypertextual stroll through the driftwork that is the differend...) (perhaps it's to early but it seems to me that the terror of totality - our fear of repeating the two great failed revolutionary experiments of our societies the USA and SU-1917 is fading...) regard steve > > First there is an injustice, and then there is the naming of it, says common > moral sense. But the awareness of it is not an individual business, not a > private language business. If it has been articulated by anyone, it always > already belongs to language. Yet, there is a general unease about accepting > that people produce (moral, among others) truths, that the truth of the > matter with regards to injustice and suffering is nothing more than a > narration, a 'fiction' even. There must be something like pre-discursive > experience that suffers under certain discursive systems and that > precipitates moral change. Indeed, how does moral progress happen? How do > "symbolic orders" get pervaded by new sounds and metaphors that turn into > general awareness of a grievance? What allowed phrases such as 'aint I a > woman', or the 'bluest eye', to capture the discursive field and stir it > irreversibly? --------------EB4A7EB8797CE03D2068211B
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